


So Just Give It One More Try

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Series 12 Vignettes [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Nightmares, Post-Episode: s12e07 Can You Hear Me?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-22
Updated: 2020-02-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:53:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22736743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Yaz wants nothing more than to be left alone to recover from her nightmare. The Doctor has other ideas.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan
Series: Series 12 Vignettes [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731406
Comments: 10
Kudos: 72





	So Just Give It One More Try

“What did you see?”

The Doctor’s voice was so quiet that for a moment, Yaz thought she’d imagined it. It was just the two of them in the console room; Ryan and Graham had disappeared in favour of splashing around in one of the swimming pools, but Yaz hadn’t felt like sharing the experience and had made her excuses. Usually, there would be nothing else like it to cheer her up; if she was lucky, she might even be able to wrangle a go on the waterslide between Ryan and Graham’s incessant hogging of it, but today something felt different. She didn’t feel up to forcing a smile or pretending that everything was fine, and so she was sat in a corner of the console room, lost in her own thoughts as she rested her head on her hands and stared into space.

“What?” she asked, shaking her head to try and break herself from her reverie.

“What did you see?” the Doctor asked again, looking over at her from the console with an unreadable expression. “What did Zellin… you know?”

“I…” Yaz felt a hard lump form in her throat at the prospect of having to tell the Doctor the truth. “It doesn’t matter.”

“It does matter, because you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Maybe I have,” Yaz muttered sourly, turning away from the Doctor and looking down at her lap, a shiver running through her as she remembered the face of her sister in the nightmare, and the cold, hard way in which she’d goaded her. “I don’t wanna talk about it.”

There was a brief moment of silence, and then the Doctor leapt over the back of the sofa and plonked herself down beside her, ignoring Yaz’s yelp of surprise and complaint.

“Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor said sternly, crossing her legs on the seat like a small child and propping her head on her hand. “What did I say to you, the first time we met?”

“You said lots of things, most of them bonkers.”

“I said I was calling you Yaz, because we’re friends now,” the Doctor wrinkled her nose with a grin, before her expression became more serious. “And friends talk about things. I think. That is still a thing, isn’t it?”

“It is, but I don’t want to talk about it.”

The Doctor’s expression softened, and when she next spoke, her tone was more subdued, and wracked with guilt. “I didn’t know what to say to Graham to help,” she confessed, her eyes darting around the room as she relived the moment. Yaz could see the pain that the admission was causing the Time Lady, and she felt a sudden rush of sadness for the Doctor. “He told me what he was worried about, and I just… I couldn’t find the words to tell him it was going to be alright, and that I could help. I didn’t want to lie, but I didn’t want to make him feel alone, and I just… didn’t say anything, and I feel bad about it. I can’t promise to find the words to help you, either, but I want to try. I don’t want to just… be socially awkward for ever. You three deserve better than that. _Everyone_ deserves better than that.”

“And me telling you my dream will help?”

“It might,” the Doctor tilted her head to the side, considering the question, before admitting apprehensively: “I’m sort of winging this, if I’m honest.”

Yaz weighed the offer up. Part of her – most of her – was screaming that telling anyone about how she’d felt three years before was a mistake. Her feelings, so strong and all-consuming then, felt embarrassing and shameful now; felt like something that had happened to another person in another life that was only distantly related to hers. Saying the words out loud made what had happened seem real, but it also sounded so woefully hyperbolic that she was worried no-one would take her seriously.

Sonya understood; Sonya had been so intrinsically caught up in it all, against her will, that there was no escaping the fact that they both knew what had so nearly happened, and both knew that to try and put into words what had happened was fruitless. But she’d meant it when she’d told her sister that they could stop marking it; meant it when she’d said she felt that celebrating it wasn’t quite the right thing to do. She knew they both thought about it – wondered, sometimes, how much Sonya did so, and felt pangs of guilt about it – but to celebrate the day on which she’d almost made the wrong decision seemed… perverse. She’d almost done the most final thing a person could do. It wasn’t the sort of occasion most people lauded with a meal and a film on the sofa.

And yet… she was proud of herself. She was proud of how far she’d come; proud of what she’d achieved in the three years since. She’d made progress; made friends; made a life for herself. Wrapped herself up in the things she loved and cared about, until there was almost no room in her mind for the memory of a teenage girl who had wanted, with every fibre of her being, to die. A teenage girl who had fled from her home with a carefully-packed bag, leaving behind a note that had, ultimately, saved her life. Sonya had known. Sonya had always known, and she had done what had seemed inconceivable to Yaz: she had made a call. She had asked for help, and she had got it. Her sister had saved her life, and she would never be able to repay that debt to Sonya.

But… would the Doctor understand? How could she? She had lost everything, and yet Yaz was sure that she wasn’t seeking ways to end it all in the most final of ways. She was still smiling; still showing them the universe with a grin; although Yaz knew, deep down, what the expression on the Doctor’s face when no-one else was looking meant. She knew what an empty smile concealed, and the Doctor’s expression of ebullience never quite reached her eyes. Perhaps they had more in common than Yaz had first thought; perhaps the Doctor might understand.

“I urm…” Yaz began, chewing her lip self-consciously. “I dreamt about summat that happened a few years back.”

The Doctor didn’t speak. She just looked at Yaz with silent encouragement, offering her a small smile in a way that Yaz knew was reassuring her that it was alright to go on; alright to continue with her explanation.

“I was… things were… not good. I was getting picked on… people were just. You know what teenagers are like. Finding anything they could to bully me about. Calling me names, shoving me, threatening me. Saying stuff on Facebook and Snapchat; saying they were going to jump me the way home and hurt me. Calling me names, saying I was this and that and the other. And because of that, I was worried about going to school, so my grades went out the window, and Mum and Dad just… got on my case, you know? It wasn’t their fault – they didn’t really get what was happening at school and so much of it was happening online that they just… they couldn’t get their heads around it, because it wasn’t something they experienced, especially not where so much of it was on my phone. I was struggling, and they couldn’t quite unpick it, so they just kept up the usual pressures on me. Get good grades, knuckle down, do well. And because I couldn’t do well, I felt like… I felt like I was letting them down. Felt like I was letting everyone down; you’ve seen what my family went through, before coming to Sheffield. I always had a sense of that… a sense of their expectations for me. Always felt that I owed it to them to succeed. So, I just felt… trapped. I was failing everyone; I was letting everyone down. I was useless; I was weird; I was stupid. I hated myself, in more ways than one. And no-one got it… or it felt like no-one got it.”

The Doctor nodded, but still didn’t speak.

“I just… things got bad. I don’t… I can’t…” her voice trembled at the thought of voicing aloud some of the things she’d done.

“You don’t have to say anything you don’t want,” the Doctor said quietly, and Yaz nodded gratefully. “It’s alright.”

She took a deep breath, and then continued in a stronger tone: “It got bad, and I just… I couldn’t see a way out. Didn’t feel like anyone cared. I packed a bag and walked out the house, and just… kept walking and walking and walking. Ended up on this road Mum and Dad used to take us along sometimes, me and Sonya, to look at the view. You can see the whole city spread out below you, and I had this idea that maybe… I don’t know, maybe if I stayed up there long enough, someone might… _see_ me, in more ways than one. They might see me and come up to speak to me; might finally understand how I felt. But they didn’t, of course. I sat there for hours, and then I realised that the real reason I’d gone up there was to say goodbye to it all, I suppose. Cheesy as it sounds, I think I wanted to make peace with the place I came from before I went off and… well.”

“Well?”

“I was going to find somewhere quiet. I didn’t want anyone I knew to find me. That’s why I left home, why I couldn’t do it there; I couldn’t… the thought of Sonya or Mum or Dad…”

Yaz’s throat closed up, and she couldn’t manage any more. The thought of what she had almost subjected her family to never failed to take her breath away, and she closed her eyes tightly, willing away the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks.

But she didn’t need to say anything else; the Doctor understood. Her friend reached over and rested her hand gently on her arm, giving it a reassuring squeeze, and Yaz opened her eyes, forcing back the tears that burned there. She offered the Doctor a tight, grateful smile, and there was something so open and vulnerable about her friend’s expression that she found the strength to go on.

“But Sonya, she… she knew something wasn’t right and then she found my note, and she called the police. And this police officer who came and found me… she seemed to really get it. She promised me things would change, and I didn’t believe her, but they have. She promised it anyway though, and I told her I didn’t believe her but she just promised it and promised it, and reminded me that I could get through it; reminded me that help was out there. And I let her take me home, and Mum and Dad went mental, but I think they finally understood then how I’d been feeling. I think they finally realised what had been going on.”

“And the nightmare?” the Doctor asked quietly. “What happened in that?”

“I was back on the road,” Yaz’s eyes filled with unbidden tears as she remembered the nightmare that had plagued her intermittently since that fateful day. She could go for weeks without having it, but it was worse around the anniversary; worse when her self-doubt set in; worse when she felt alone and scared. “And Sonya… she was there. She told me she wouldn’t call anyone, because there was no point. She told me I was weak. She told me to d-do it r-right…” she dissolved into tears, unable to say any more.

“Yasmin Khan,” the Doctor said quietly, passing her a handkerchief that Yaz wiped her eyes with gratefully. “You’re a very long way from being weak.”

Yaz took a deep breath, mopping her face again before saying shakily: “But I couldn’t face anything. I just wanted to run and run and run away, and then stop running in the most awful way.”

“Because you were scared, and overwhelmed, and you couldn’t see a way out.”

“There’s always a way out.”

“Yes, but in that moment you couldn’t see one,” the Doctor continued with a shrug, as though it were evident. “And that’s alright. It doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human.”

“Doctor, I just wanted… I just remember wanting so much to not be alive anymore.”

“Well, I meant what said,” the Doctor smiled sadly at her, shaking her arm gently. “Can’t have a universe without Yaz.”

Yaz snorted in derision, remembering the first time the words had been said to her and how much they had meant; remembering how hard it had been not to let the gravity of them show. “Yeah, you could.”

“No, we couldn’t,” the Doctor shook her head fiercely, her expression stubborn. “It wouldn’t be anywhere near as nice. And you might not feel it, but you’re important. To me, to Graham, to Ryan. You make us all smile, and you look after us. You’re the sensible one; you’re the one who stops us from doing anything properly insane. If we had no Yaz, we’d have no us! No team! No gang!”

“I know,” Yaz exhaled shakily, offering the Doctor a tentative smile as she realised the truth of what the Time Lady was saying; she _was_ the responsible one. Unable to keep from dwelling on the thought, she blurted: “Ryan said something to me, back in Australia… I don’t know, it was almost like he knew. After the Kasaavin, he was worried about me. And I remember how I felt when I was in that dimension, and it was like… it was just like being back on that road; just miles and miles of nothingness with just me there, and I thought I was dead. And I remember thinking… if that was what death was like, I didn’t want it. I didn’t want it to be somewhere that I was conscious and alone, and Ryan promised he’d never let it happen to me. And I just…”

The Doctor leaned over and pulled Yaz into a hug without warning. Disconcerted by the unusual display of affection, Yaz froze for a few seconds as the Time Lady’s arms wrapped around her protectively, before relaxing into the embrace and resting her chin on her friend’s shoulder, closing her eyes and returning the hug. She was safe now. She knew that, logically, and yet she still felt the occasional rush of fear or apprehension; still felt a residual sense of anxiety that everything would be yanked out from beneath her and her thoughts would overwhelm her once again.

“I’m never going to let anything happen to you,” the Doctor vowed in a low, fierce voice. “Any of you. Alright?”

Yaz nodded, unable to find the appropriate words to respond verbally.

“And I’m glad that police officer found you when she did.”

Yaz nodded again, closing her eyes against the tears that welled up there.

“And I don’t want you to ever feel like that ever again.”

“I won’t. I don’t.”

“But it never really goes away,” the Doctor said quietly. “Believe me, I know.”

Yaz gave her a squeeze, understanding what the Time Lady was trying to tell her and feeling a rush of empathy for her friend. “I know.”

“And if it does come back… I want you to tell me, alright? Because I don’t want you wandering around my ship, or wandering around by my side, feeling lost in the dark. Not ever.”

“Alright.”

“Promise me, Yaz,” the Doctor said sternly. “Promise.”

“I promise.”

The Doctor pulled back and looked her in the eyes, and Yaz had the sudden, oddest sensation that the Doctor could see into her soul.

“Good,” the Doctor whispered after a moment, then flashed her a grin and continued more brightly: “Now, why don’t we go and find the boys, eh? I’m sure they need supervising before they do anything daft on the waterslide again.”

Yaz snorted, grateful for the distraction, and her thoughts turned to the previous week, when Ryan had gone down the chute headfirst and accidentally swallowed what had seemed like half of the swimming pool.

“Probably a good idea,” she acquiesced with a grimace. “They need a responsible adult.”

“They do,” the Doctor preened. “Very much so.”

“I don’t know who you think I’m talking about,” Yaz teased, letting go of her friend and folding her arms in an authoritative manner, before adding in her best PC Khan voice: “But I mean me.”

“Right,” the Doctor grimaced. “Probably a very good point. Race you there?”

“Fine,” Yaz rolled her eyes, and the Doctor got to her feet, standing poised to take off at a sprint. “Ready, set… go.”

She let the Time Lady have a head start before setting off herself, laughter filtering back to her through the maze of corridors.

 _Moments can change,_ she thought to herself. _And they have._


End file.
